All That Is in God

ALL THAT IS IN GOD Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism James E. Dolezal
This is the best of all kinds of theology books: it is a knife fight in the park at 2 am between the Jets and the Sharks. The boys are out for blood. Bodies are going to drop. This one determines who gets the turf.

 The turf is “classical Christian” (“CC”) theology, specifically the “Doctrine of Divine Simplicity” (“DDS.”) DDS posits that God is ONE; God has no parts, divisions, subdivisions, separate powers, or separate motivations. God is Who HE Is at all times, pure act, with no potential. When we speak of God's justice as opposed to God's mercy, that distinction is a habit of speech required by our finite, material, monkey brains. God's justice is God's mercy, is God's existence, now and forever. 

We may experience these things as separate, but in God they cannot be different because anything with parts can change. One part can be active, another inactive, then vice versa. Today, a human decides to be more merciful than just; tomorrow, more just than merciful. Things can change.

The DDS saves God from change. The DDS recognizes that God cannot change because God is perfect and any change would mean that God is either getting better or getting worse, and that isn't what we mean by God.

The author is James Dolezal. James Dolezal is professor of theology in the School of Divinity at Cairn University. He also serves as visiting professor of theology at International Reformed Baptist Seminary in Mansfield, TX. He is “Reformed” (Calvinist, not drunkard.) 

Dolezal's implacable foes - the “orcs” who dispute his passage - are the “Theistic Mutualists.” You may not know it but Medium is planted thick with “Theistic Mutualists” (“TMs”) - far thicker than with classical Christian Theists (“CCTs”). You can recognize the TMs by the spore they leave behind. 

Dolezal defines the CCT position as:

Two distinctly different models of Christian theism are presently vying for the heart and mind of evangelical Christianity. The approach of classical Christian theism is what one discovers in older Protestant confessions such as the Belgic Confession, Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Westminster Confession of Faith, and Second London Confession of Faith. This approach is basically in keeping with the view of God as found in the works of patristic and medieval Christian theologians such as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. It is marked by a strong commitment to the doctrines of divine aseity, immutability, impassibility, simplicity, eternity, and the substantial unity of the divine persons. The underlying and inviolable conviction is that God does not derive any aspect of His being from outside Himself and is not in any way caused to be.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 15). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

The TMs are described as:

In contrast to this older view of a radically independent, simple, and purely actual God stands the newer approach of theistic mutualism,1 called by some “theistic personalism.”2 In an effort to portray God as more relatable, theistic mutualists insist that God is involved in a genuine give-and-take relationship with His creatures. Theistic mutualists may disagree among themselves on precisely how much control God has over the give-and-take process, but all agree that God is somehow involved in such an exchange.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 15). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

Dolezal and your humble reviewer play for Team CCT.

TMs want a god who can be in a real relationship with humans. What this “real relationship” really means, though, is a god capable of being affected by humans, and what that means is a god who will do what we want it to do. This god would care if we are sad so if we make ourselves sad, then this god will do something to “unsaddenness” us.

Weirdly, TMs invariably imagine a god that is amazingly like an early 21st-century Woke Leftist. This is a feature of their theology, not an accident.

Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe notifies us that “there has been a deplorable and idolatrous tendency on the part of some Christians to diminish God. In order that God may stand in relationship with his creatures, he is made one of them, a member of the universe, subject to change and even disappointment and suffering.”11 He deems this mutualist understanding to be a “false and idolatrous picture of God” because it unavoidably considers Him to be “an inhabitant of the universe, existing alongside his creatures.”12 More recently, the Eastern Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart has insisted that any proposed alternative to the God of classical theism “can never be more than an idol: a god, but not God; a theos, but not ho Theos; a being, not Being in its transcendent fullness.”13 The reason for these strong objections to mutualist understandings of God is that such a God is inevitably mutable and finite and as such is unworthy of worship. This unhappy verdict is not meant to attack the intentions of theistic mutualists. Many seem to have been unwittingly caught up into the mutualistic way of thinking about God, wholly unaware of its idolatrous implications.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (pp. 18–19). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

Dolezal is far more charitable than I am. I think TMs want a god that will smite “patriarchal,” “racist,” “white,” “male,” and “old men” conservatives for being intolerant meanies and reverse engineer their theology to get there. And by “reverse engineer,” I mean that they have gone back to a kind of passive-aggressive paganism where victim status takes the place of animal sacrifice in getting the Powerful Man in the Sky to do the things you want.

The post-Pagan God was understood to not be dependent in any way on anything outside of God. God was “impassive”; He could not be affected by external reality (which, after all, he made and sustained.) This God is not a Powerful Man in the Sky who may be manipulated but something deeper and more fearsome, i.e., reality itself.

Unchanging God

One of the features that Team TM must find attractive is that it doesn't require much imagination (or reading.) A TMer just asks, “what would I do if I were God” and - voila! - they have all the information they need. A CCT, though, has to imagine what it is like to be existence itself, without beginning, or without change, something that can happen only by applying via Negativa and stripping away everything that is contrary to existence, immutability, or aseity.

“Aseity?” What a funny word!

Perhaps, but it is wired into the Ur-source of TM and CCT:

The perfection that maintains God's self-sufficiency is sometimes referred to as God's aseity (from the Latin a se - of himself, from himself). Herman Bavinck explains the significance of this doctrine: “When God ascribes this aseity to himself in Scripture, he makes himself known as absolute being, as the one who is in an absolute sense. By this perfection he is at once essentially and absolutely distinct from all creatures.”3 The English Puritan Stephen Charnock makes a similar point regarding aseity: “God is of himself, from no other.... God hath no original; he hath no defect because he was not made of nothing: he hath no increase because he had no beginning. He was before all things, and, therefore, depends upon no other thing.”4 That which has no beginning cannot begin to be in any respect. One clear implication of this doctrine is that God neither derives anything from His creation, nor is He the cause of Himself: “It is evident from the word ‘aseity,' God is exclusively from himself, not in the sense of being self-caused but being from eternity to eternity who he is, being not becoming.”5 This doctrine is supported by a number of biblical passages.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 23). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

Job is an extended essay on “aseity.”

In the context of the Job narrative, both these rebukes of Eliphaz and Elihu are in response to Job's insistence that he is righteous and that God thus owes him a hearing and an explanation regarding the calamity that has come upon him (see Job 31:33–37). The two rebukes imply that God owes no one anything because He receives nothing from the creature. God is not touched or moved by His creation inasmuch as touching or moving conveys new actuality to the one touched or moved and thus indebts the one moved to the mover.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 25). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

God's aseity means that God is “pure act.” There is no “potentiality” in God to be something other than God. This goes back to Aristotle's explanation of the First Mover found in The Metaphysics, Book 12, where the Unmoved Mover is always in the state that all other things would choose to be in if they could. Aseity and actuality mean immutability:

If there is nothing in God's existence or life that is given to Him by the creature, and if He is not the cause of Himself because He is pure being, then it follows that He cannot undergo change. That is, He cannot be made to be in any way that He is not in and of Himself already. If such should occur, one would have to explain how new actuality was made to appear in the being of God.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 28). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

This is where Team TM falters. They want a mutable god. Only mutable gods can really interact with people as people interact with each other. The problem, though, is that they don't want a too-immutable god who might forget its promises. So, they fancy a god who remembers the good parts - salvation promises - but might feel guilty and learn from the Holocaust.

However:

One reason that change in God, no matter how small, is theologically devastating is that it would signify some alteration in His being or life and thus, to the extent that such change occur, destabilize human confidence in His covenant promises.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 29). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

Divine Simplicity.

All of this entails the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity:

The principal claim of divine simplicity is that God is not composed of parts. Whatever is composed of parts depends upon its parts in order to be as it is. A part is anything in a subject that is less than the whole and without which the subject would be really different than it is. In short, composite beings need their parts in order to exist as they do. Moreover, the parts in an integrated whole require a composer distinct from themselves to unify them, an extrinsic source of unity. If God should be composed of parts - of components that were prior to Him in being - He would be doubly dependent: first, on the parts, and second, on the composer of the parts.8 But God is absolute in being, alone the sufficient reason for Himself and all other things, and so cannot in any respect derive His being from another. Because God cannot depend on what is not God in order to be God, theologians traditionally insist that all that is in God is God.9

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 47). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

Chief among the principles of divine simplicity is that God's essence is God's existence. We humans exist and then we don't. Our essence has momentary existence. God's essence is identical to His existence. Also:

Similarly, God does not merely instantiate divinity as a particular concrete instance of it. Rather, He is divinity itself. No man is humanity as such, but God is divinity as such. Many theologians even conclude that God's essential identity with His own existence is the ontological foundation of His name “I AM” (Ex. 3:14).

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (pp. 47–48). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

Dolezal's explanation of the DDS is as good as it gets.

Divine Simplicity Lost.

The DDS was the central unifying doctrine of Christian theology for centuries. Much of Aquinas's analysis of God relies principally on the DDS. Dolezal advises that prior to 1750, no theological treatise would have been written without attention to the DDS. After 1750, the stock value of the DDS declined. Dolezal suggests that the reason could lie in philosophy's changing understanding of “causation.” Since that time, Evangelicals have developed objections to the DDS on various grounds. 

The gist of these grounds are those which could be found on Medium, namely, that the denial of essence/existence distinction is too hard to understand, or something that we don't see with human beings, or makes God seems less relatable. 

The problem is that abandoning the DDS means abandoning God's absoluteness and uniqueness:
rather unlike a doctrine of divine simplicity. The classical doctrine of simplicity denies that God's attributes are really distinct in Him.29 The reasoning is that if God is identical with His own act of being, then He cannot depend on a multitude of really distinct causes of that being. And that is precisely how properties or attributes function in the entities in which they inhere. They are determinations of being which are distinct from the whole and which cause those things that exhibit or exemplify them to be in some way or another. The illustration given at the beginning of this chapter of a wise and powerful man may help illumine this point. Possessing the property of wisdom is that by virtue of which Albert is actually wise. The property of power is that by virtue of which he is actually powerful. These attributes are really distinct in the subject insofar as they are really discrete determinations of being in him. Wisdom makes Albert to be wise, and power makes him to be powerful. But Albert could be wise and lack power, or powerful and lack wisdom. This is because among creatures power and wisdom are not the same property and thus function as discrete determinations of the creature's actuality. But in God there is no such distinction inasmuch as that by virtue of which He is wise is simply His divinity and that by virtue of which He is powerful is the selfsame divinity - and so on for all His other attributes. There can be no real composition or aggregation of virtues if all are just one and the same reality - namely, divinity itself. God's essence, being simple, in no way follows from a composition or aggregation of His attributes.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (pp. 74–75). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

One of the useful features of Dolezal's book is that he “names names.” We lay people get a useful opportunity to see which theologians are trading in novel post-modern heresies.

Eternal Creator.

Eternity is another of God's attributes that take it on the chin. Eternity means the fact that God's life and existence is not divided into parts. God does not live “now” which becomes “then.” For God, everything is “now.” God exists outside of time and looks at all time from an outside-of-time perspective.

No less a figure than William Lane Craig has objected God's eternity on the grounds that God entered into time with the Creation:

Craig explains this motive for affirming divine temporality: “By virtue of his creating a temporal world, God comes into a relation with the world the moment it springs into being. Thus even if it is not the case that God is temporal prior to his creation of the world, he undergoes an extrinsic change at the moment of creation which draws him into time in virtue of his real relation to the world.”31 We can see the theistic mutualist supposition at work here. If God creates, then He is drawn into a give-and-take relationship with creation.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 91). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

Dolezal explains the insight of the opponents of eternity as follows:

We must first observe the common conviction that binds them together: God cannot create or bring about temporal effects without ontologically participating in the temporality of His creation. Whatever their disagreements may be regarding the notion of divine timelessness - never timeless, no longer timeless, or presently timeless and temporal - all are agreed on at least this one thing, which thinking proceeds thus: A temporal effect can only proceed from a temporal act of causation, and such acts can only go forth from temporal agents.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 94). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

This is seemingly a good argument -except for the part about saying God cannot do something - but it has the same effect of making God dependent on something less than God:
The point is that if God should take on intermediary properties of being by which He acts in the world - such as Lister's “acting in time,” or Oliphint's “covenantal properties” - then these properties, which are themselves not God, would form the foundation for God's agency in the order of creation. Plainly put, if God should require the acquisition of new properties in order to mediate His activity toward and in the world, then He could not act in the world as divine, as God.

Dolezal, James E.. All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (p. 95). Reformation Heritage Books. Kindle Edition.

You can catch the rest of the review at Medium:

https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/all-that-is-in-god-evangelical-theology-and-the-challenge-of-classical-christian-theism-james-e-9ca7c64b5225